by Jan Morris
69 The kiss
Driving through Vienna once in a rented car, I slowed down uncertainly to decide upon my route. Instantly the driver in the car behind blasted his horn most rudely. I gave him a vulgar two-fingered sign which I would never have dreamt of using had I not recently learnt that it was merely a gesture devised by Welsh archers to prove to opponents that their shooting-fingers were intact. When the other car overtook me its occupants both looked eagerly in my direction. The stout tight-buttoned horn-rimmed burgher at the wheel shook his jowls at me in affronted astonishment. His wife blew me a kiss.
70 An interlude on flags
Let us now give ourselves a break, in our fitful march across Europe, and contemplate a few matters that are common to the whole continent but at the same time illustrate its infinite variety. First, flags. All these States and Powers, and some of the nations, have their own flags. Political progressives used to dislike them – ‘rags to be planted on dunghills’ – but they remain emotive symbols for most Europeans. Although none of them are treated with the superstitious respect that old-school Americans accord Old Glory (which may not, under Public Law No. 623, touch the ground, the floor or water, and should never be carried horizontally except when draped over a casket), the flags of Europe are full of meaning. Some of the oldest display the Christian cross in one form or another – testimony to this continent’s founding unity, or perhaps to the fervours inspired in its people by their battles against Islam. The Danes were the first to adopt it: they had been saved from defeat in a thirteenth-century campaign against the Estonians when a red banner with a white cross floated miraculously down from Heaven, and they rallied round it. Today the British, the Swiss, the Greeks and all the Scandinavians still fly some version of the cross of Christ.
Most of the other European flags are tricolours, distinguishable from each other only by their colours, the arrangement of their colours or the way their stripes run. For this we can blame the French. The Dutch were the first to have a flag of three coloured stripes, and because of their long war of independence against Spain it came to symbolize libertarian principles across Europe. But after their revolution, in 1797, the French adopted the schema for themselves, turned the stripes vertical rather than horizontal, and gave everyone the idea that the colours were intended to represent their own ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The pattern – the pattern of nineteenth-century political correctness – has since been unimaginatively copied, sometimes with minor embellishments, by at least seventeen European States, down to our own times: skilled indeed are the vexillologists (from the Latin vexillum, a banner) who can match every flag to its country.
In the days of monarchical Powers the national flags, though fewer, were much more fun, being gorgeous with two-headed eagles, golden crowns and crossed sceptres. The minute sovereignty of Liechtenstein still has a crown on its flag, and Vatican City has a papal mitre. Albania flaunts the black double-headed eagle of the hero Skanderbeg. Bosnia-Hercegovina has a blue heraldic shield on a white background. The Scots have a rampant heraldic lion on a yellow background, and the Welsh have the most striking flag of them all, the Red Dragon of Cadwaladr against a background of green and white, claimed by some to be directly descended from the purple griffins of Roman imperial banners. The colours of many other national flags are the inherited feudal colours of vanished princedoms, archdukedoms or margravates, but in design only a few are still distinctive. The Scandinavians enliven their fairly orthodox ensigns by cutting them in swallow-tails. The Swiss have the grand simplicity of a small white cross on a plain red background (conveniently reversed for the most celebrated of Swiss institutions, the International Red Cross). The Greek Cypriots have a map of the island – the whole of it! – on their flag. The English combined their own cross of St George with the Scottish cross of St Andrew and the Irish cross of St Patrick to emblemize for ever, or so they hoped, the union between the three countries, and called it the Union Flag (for a time it had a harp in the centre, to symbolize not Wales but Ireland more emphatically). The elegant Breton flag of black and white – Gwenn ha Du – is said to represent the linguistic division of Brittany: black for the French language, white for the Breton.
Outside the European institutions, in Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg, many of these flags bravely fly, and with them is the newest and not the least handsome of the continent’s banners: the deep blue flag of the somewhat tentative European Union. It has twelve gold stars upon it, arranged in a circle. This design will remain the same however the Union’s membership expands or contracts (as I write there are fifteen member states): not for the convenience of flag-makers, but because the Council of Ministers long ago decided that a circle of twelve was the definitive symbol, as their publicists put it, of ‘perfection and entirety’.
71 An interlude on anthems
All the European States, and some of the nations, have their anthems. I am everybody’s patriot, and many of them move me greatly, when properly performed in the right circumstances. Could anyone resist the call of ‘La Marseillaise’, played by the mounted band of the Republican Guard as it clops, plumes astir, down the Champs-Élysées? Napoleon himself said it was the Republic’s greatest general! I am even stirred by ‘God Save the Queen’, that lumpish old melody of the British, when it is played with sufficient solemnity, or in Elgar’s spectacularly grandiose arrangement.
Actually in historical terms ‘God Save the King’, as it was originally, is much the most distinguished of them all. Although it is apparently hard to put a definite name to either its author or its composer, it has certainly existed in more or less its present form since the 1740s, and has some claim to being the best-known tune in the world. It was the first national anthem, for one thing, being originally given that title in 1825, when most of the States of modern Europe did not yet exist. It is also much the most widely used. Beethoven wrote a set of variations on it to ‘show the English what a blessing they have in “God Save the King” ’. Twenty other countries have at one time or another adopted the tune for patriotic songs of their own. In Germany it was the tune of ‘Heil Dir im Siegerkranz’ – ‘Hail to Thee in the Victor’s Crown’ – which was the German national anthem until 1922 (though in the time of the showy and extravagant Kaiser Wilhelm II it was suggested that its opening words should be altered to ‘Heil Dir im Sonderzug’ – ‘Hail to Thee in the Special Train’).
Half a century ago, wherever the British were, the playing of ‘God Save the King’ was always a formal occasion, most of the monarch’s subjects standing ramrod stiff, even at the end of a movie, until the last chord died away. Concert-goers, it was said, were sometimes to be seen bobbing up and down whenever the melody sounded, as it frequently did, in Weber’s Jubilee Overture. The years passed, people grew more fidgety during the anthem, and cinema managers took to playing only the first phrase of the hymn. And when it was found that more and more customers were ignoring it, gathering their hats and coats and creeping out of the cinema when the music began, generally speaking they stopped playing ‘God Save the Queen’ altogether. It is still broadcast in full gravity at the end of the day’s transmissions on the BBC, and I dare say there are still a few devoted subjects who stand to attention, thumbs down the seams of their trousers, until the last chord fades and they can go to bed.
Other countries, other styles … The original Yugoslav anthem, when the Yugoslav kingdom was formed after the First World War, consisted essentially of Serb, Croat and Bosnian national songs ingeniously strung together: under Marshal Tito, after the Second World War, it was a lyric starting ‘Hej, Slaveni!’ – ‘Hey, Slavs!’ – sung to a tune cribbed from the Polish national anthem. The anthem of the Corsican patriots is a seventeenth-century hymn to the Virgin Mary; they long ago changed its words slightly, from the dedicatory ‘Give us victory over your enemies’ to the inflammatory ‘Give us victory over our enemies.’ The Welsh national anthem is dedicated, uniquely, to the survival of the national language – ‘O bydded i�
��r hen iaith barhau!’ – ‘O, may the old tongue survive!’
The most beautiful and fateful of anthems is the glorious tune that Haydn wrote in 1797 to be ‘The Emperor’s Hymn’, the first national anthem of Habsburg Austria, and eventually sung in ten official translations throughout the Habsburg Empire. It was consciously intended to rival ‘God Save the King’, and to answer the inspirational momentum of the French Revolution. Haydn based his melody on an old Croatian folk-tune, which he remembered from his childhood among the Croatian settlements of Lower Austria, and he loved it. He used it too as variations in the Emperor Quartet, and until the end of his days frequently played the tune on his piano – it was the last music, it is said, that he ever did play. It was only in 1922 that the German Weimar Republic adopted it as a national anthem, and gave it the unfortunately ambivalent lyric ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’: a poem written in 1848, by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, as a plea for the unity of the German peoples, Maas to Memel, ‘above all else in the world’. The Nazis adored it, almost as much as they adored the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, and so this lovely tune – the perfect melody, to my mind – came to represent all that was most ominous and arrogant in Germanness. It is still the national anthem of Germany, but only the second verse of the poem is used now, and contemporary Germans sing about striving for unity, rights and freedom ‘brotherly with heart and hand’.
In 1823 Beethoven incorporated in his Choral Symphony the words of a poem by Friedrich Schiller – ‘Be embraced, you millions! This kiss is for all the world!’ He set it to a melody so tremendously inspiring, so simple in theme but so rich in orchestration, that it is generally judged to provide one of the supreme moments of symphonic art. It is the ‘Ode to Joy’, the anthem of the European Union.
72 An interlude on parliaments
All the States of Europe have their parliaments, because they all call themselves democracies. The worst police States of Communist Europe used to be called Democratic Republics, and it was a pretence even of the crazy Ceauşescu that he was the popularly elevated guide of his people. Like markets and law courts, for a taste of the national flavour the parliaments of Europe are always worth visiting, if you can get past the policeman at the gate. (‘Anything interesting to see this evening?’ I once asked the doorman at the Irish Dáil. ‘There’s always me,’ he said – ‘I’m interesting.’) Most of the buildings are unexciting, generally cast in the neoclassical mode that was fashionable and symbolically explicit when the parliamentary system took hold in Europe in the nineteenth century, but one or two have flair. The British Houses of Parliament seem to me the most exciting buildings in London, all spikes, towers and serried windows beside the Thames. The parliament at Budapest, although for most of its career it has been hardly more than a creature of despotic masters, stands with a similar but more monstrous panache beside the Danube. They used to call it ‘The House of Lies’ in the Communist days, when its parliamentarians met for only eight days in the year, but one can forgive it a lot – it was the first European public building to be air-conditioned, and until 1839 all its proceedings were in Latin.
Most parliaments turn out to be fairly dull in performance, too, the delegates sitting chaste and ordered in their horseshoe ranks, but sometimes there are flashes of animation. London’s House of Commons, which likes to call itself the Mother of Parliaments, can sometimes be interesting to watch, if only because the confrontational style of British politics brings out the worst and occasionally the wittiest in parliamentarians. If you are lucky you might come across a minor riot in one of the assemblies of southern Europe. But for national revelation I most recommend the infinitesimal parliament of the Icelanders, a modest little grey assembly house next door to Reykjavik Cathedral, at least as I knew it in the 1970s. No pomp and little circumstance attended the deliberations then. If it was winter, the members’ galoshes were parked neatly outside the chamber door, and in the public gallery loungers cheerfully read newspapers in the warm. Icelandic politics can be vicious, but the parliamentarians rarely burst into invective, perhaps because they were nearly all each other’s cousins, and often in armchairs at the side of the chamber members comfortably smoked their pipes together, for all the world as though they had dropped by for a family discussion. Occasionally a page hastened in, with a quotation for the Foreign Minister perhaps, or a statistic for the Minister of Finance, but he was likely to be wearing a check shirt, a green jersey and corduroy trousers, and as often as not he interrupted the flow of debate by banging the door behind him. Nobody much minded. ‘Drat the boy,’ one seemed to hear the Honourable Members murmuring. ‘His father was just the same.’
73 An interlude on food
All the various countries have their own cuisines, too, and often flaunt them, although fast and frozen foods are rapidly taking over in most parts – the Big Mac is not just an American innovation, but springs from the human heart. I am anything but a gourmet, but here are some of my conclusions, observations and recollections after half a century of eating European.
¶ The Italians eat most sensibly. The British eat most unhealthily. The Spaniards eat most abstemiously. The Scandinavians eat most fastidiously. The Greeks eat most monotonously. The Belgians eat most indigestibly. The French eat most pretentiously. The Germans eat most.
¶ Irish oysters are best. German asparagus is best. Dried cod is best in Portugal, eaten with onions and scrambled eggs. Raw herrings are best in The Netherlands. The richest dish I ever ate was a soup made of baby eels, in Valencia. The worst food I ever ate was the salted beef, with thick fringes of yellow fat around it, that was popular in England fifty years ago and was probably horse-meat. The best food I ever eat is pasta al burro with a local red wine and a mixed salad almost anywhere you care to mention in Italy.
¶ My favourite café in Europe is the Grand Café in the main square at Oslo: this is dominated by a huge mural of the place identifying regular customers of its nineteenth-century prime – Master of the Horse Sverdrup, Landowner Gjerns, Writers Olsen and Ibsen, and many another – all of whom, mutatis mutandis, are to be seen to this day eating prawns and smoking at its tables. My favourite European restaurant is the Walnut Tree near Y Fenni – Abergavenny – in Wales, one of whose famous specialities is Lady Llanover’s Salted Duck. My favourite European bar is Harry’s in Venice, where sultry Italian aristocrats swapping modish gossip confront self-conscious tourists laughing nervously when they see the bill.
¶ In Cognac, France, they offer you soup, pâté and sausages for breakfast. In Aachen, Germany, they sell twenty different kinds of liquorice. Belgian specialities include deep-fried sausages stuffed with shrimps, and mussels with potato chips. It used to be said (though I find it hard to believe) that at Burnley, Lancashire, England, more Benedictine liqueur was drunk than anywhere else in Europe, the Lancashire Fusiliers having picked up the habit in France during the First World War. An advertisement for the Hostinec u Kalicha in Prague says that its cuisine is Heavy, Fat and Unhealthy, but Very Nice. In a little shop beside the canal at Colmar, in a part of France that used to be German, the family of Jean-B. Werz have been selling fish since 1686: they keep live crayfish in a tub, and their motto is ‘Pensez Poisson!’ – ‘Think Fish!’
¶ A Lithuanian national dish is called a capelinas, a ‘Zeppelin’, because it looks like an airship: it is made of tightly packed potato dough soaked in bacon fat, with mushrooms or a sausage in the middle, and is the most repulsive-looking food I have ever set eyes on.
¶ My guidebook to Helsinki in 1995 promised me thirteen cuisines to sample in the city – Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Mexican, Spanish, Swiss, Tex-Mex and McDonald’s. My guidebook to Paris in the same year said that Arpège, a restaurant famous for its carpaccio of langoustines with caviare, and its lobster with turnips, ‘is not the place for a casual tourist, but for people who really understand about food, such as the sophisticated and often most influential Parisians … who fill the dining-room twice
a day’. Ugh!
¶ I spent a week once at a pension in Haute-Savoie, France, eating gargantuan breakfasts, ample picnic lunches and stout dinners every day: on the way back to the airport at Geneva I stopped at the Auberge du Père Bise, then one of the most celebrated restaurants in France, for a lakeside lunch of little fishes with white wine. It was exquisite. The bill came to more than the bill for all those breakfasts, all those packed lunches, all those dinners and a week’s accommodation at the pension, and I did not regret a franc of it.
¶ The most puffed-up restaurant in Europe seems to me the Wierzynek in Kraków, Poland, which claims to have started its career with a dinner-party in 1364 attended by King Casimir the Great of Poland, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, King Louis of Hungary, King Waldemar of Denmark, King Peter of Cyprus, princes from Austria and Pomerania and the Margrave of Brandenburg. It has been entertaining kings, emperors, shahs, presidents and prime ministers ever since, and is hung all about with courtly trophies.